You can't pick cherries with your back to the tree.

Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently.

James G. Huneker

Prayer, among sane people, has never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end.

George Santayana

Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and bloody religion that has ever infected the world

Voltaire

It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor.

Max Eastman

'Tis not the dying for a faith that's so hard... 'Tis the living up to it that's difficult.

William Makepeace Thackeray

No one who achieves success does so without acknowledging the help of others. The wise and confident acknowledge this help with gratitude.

Source Unknown

Never before had I known the sudden quiver of understanding that travels from word to brain to heart, the way a new language can move, coil, swim into life under the eyes, the almost savage leap of comprehension, the instantaneous, joyful release of meaning, the way the words shed their printed bodies in a flash of heat and light.

Elizabeth Kostova

Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam that has been trucked up from Texas - stale and unprofitable. The consumer forgets that the corn tastes different where it grows.

A. J. Liebling

What a devil art thou, Poverty! How many desires -- how many aspirations after goodness and truth -- how many noble thoughts, loving wishes toward our fellows, beautiful imaginings thou hast crushed under thy heel, without remorse or pause!

Walt Whitman

In the Old Testament, it says that if you have the power to do something good, then you have to do it. You're not to avoid helping somebody in their time of need.

Rick Warren

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

H.P. (Howard Phillips) Lovecraft

You are under the unfortunate delusion that simply because you run away from danger, you have no courage. You're confusing courage with wisdom.

Source Unknown